The World's Most Dangerous Place (13 page)

The president appeared as unmoved by this tragedy as he was by the Kampala Accord protests, which he declared ‘illegal’. Soon
afterwards he appointed the Minister of Planning, the economist Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, as his fifth prime minister, a move that sparked further protests from Somalis fearful that he was little more than a placeman. Farmaajo could have joined the protests. He was popular enough, probably, to take to the desert and start a small revolution. But he was not a man of violence, and instead appealed for calm. And then he quietly returned to New York, where his old job with the Department of Transport in Buffalo had sagely been kept open for him.
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The Sharifs were expected to maintain at least some governmental continuity by agreeing to keep on the key ministers, but they were unable to compromise even on this, and in the end the whole cabinet was fired. The exasperation among the international officials whose job it was to mentor the process was palpable.

‘It is reptile politics,’ said Richard Rouget, AMISOM’s French military adviser, who had wasted months building up a relationship with the Minister of Defence. ‘Somalis think: “If I kill my enemy, even if killing him kills me too, then I’ve still won.” It is blinkered and destructive: the politics of the playground.’

As before, many of the new cabinet ministers were incomers from the diaspora who would have to learn their jobs from scratch. The calibre of some of them was questionable too. The worldly Mohamed Omaar, for instance, was replaced by Mohamed Mohamud Hajji Ibrahim, a learning support teacher at the Newman Catholic College in Brent, north London. Although
Ibraham held a degree in international relations, his main qualification appeared to be that he belonged to a sub-clan of the Rahanweyn, like the speaker. Ibrahim’s former employer, Newman College’s headmaster Richard Kolka, was as surprised as anyone by the news. ‘I was amazed and awestruck,’ he told journalists. ‘He was always such a humble guy. I’d no idea he was involved in the political life of his country, let alone at such an important level.’
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The disadvantages of the crude 4.5 formula were made plain once more. The urgent business of producing a constitution and reforming parliament, Richard Rouget reckoned, was set back by at least another three months and perhaps by as many as six. The self-defeating cycle of Somali politics had begun all over again.

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The nickname means ‘Cheese’, a word lifted directly from the Italian colonists who popularized the commodity.

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Government positions were divvied up among the clans according to the notorious ‘4.5 formula’, which is to say, equally among the four main clans, with the remaining ethnic minorities swept up into that ‘0.5’.

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When the TFG was established in 2004, there were 275 MPs. That number doubled when the TFG reconciled with ARS, Sheikh Sharif’s Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia, following the Djibouti Accord of 2008.

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Somalia has come bottom of Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index every year since 2007. In June 2012, the World Bank reported a $130m (£85m) discrepancy in the TFG’s accounts over two years. In July 2012, the UN Monitoring Group alleged that $7 in every $10 of international aid received by the TFG from 2009 to 2010 never made it into the state’s coffers. President Sheikh Sharif dismissed both charges as ‘baseless and unfounded propaganda’.

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Mahiga at last took the symbolically vital step of relocating his office to Mogadishu in January 2012.

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This was Abdihakim Mohamoud Haji Faqi, the Minister of Defence.

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Farmaajo’s return to the US was not quite the end of his political career in Somalia. To everyone’s surprise, in July 2012 he announced he was quitting his job in Buffalo in order to run against Sheikh Sharif in the presidential election. ‘I’m giving Somali politics another shot because I believe in serving the common cause for the motherland,’ he said.
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6

What makes al-Shabaab tick?

Hodan district, June 2011

Somalia’s political process may have been foundering, but by mid-2011 it was increasingly obvious that AMISOM, against all expectations abroad, were not just making good progress but actually winning their war against al-Shabaab. In three short months, the atmosphere in Mogadishu had significantly changed. Senior UN officials now argued that the rebels could not hold Mogadishu indefinitely. Some even whispered that the insurgency might capitulate, and that a total victory was possible.

The insurgents, it was true, had been losing ground to every AMISOM offensive. Morale among al-Shabaab’s foot soldiers was said to be low, and not helped by the fact that their leaders seemed to be in just as much disarray as their opponents in the TFG. So much had happened since the movement emerged in 2006. The successful expulsion of the Ethiopians had removed al-Shabaab’s first raison d’être as a nationalist resistance movement, forcing a process of reinvention that was still incomplete. What
did al-Shabaab now stand for – what did its leaders really want?

Two distinct factions had begun to emerge that summer. Al-Shabaab’s spiritual head, the 76-year-old Sheikh Aweys, and his protégé Sheikh Mukhtar Robow, 42, were the leading figures in the ‘indigenous’ faction, which was fighting to establish an Islamic theocracy in place of the democracy which, they believed, was being forced upon Somalia by America. Their aims, like those of the Afghan Taliban for whom Robow fought in the early 2000s, were fundamentally domestic: ‘Proper Islamic rule within Somalia’s current borders’, as Aweys put it.
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Robow had not just fought for the Taliban. An Islamic lawyer who studied at the University of Khartoum in the 1990s, he also once worked for the Somali branch of the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, an international Saudi charitable organization accused by the US in 2004 of having direct links to al-Qaida, and subsequently proscribed by the UN. Despite this background, most Somalis considered him a moderate compared to al-Shabaab’s other main leader, Sheikh Moktar Ali Zubeyr, known as Godane, who headed the rival ‘international’ faction within the movement, so-called because its ranks were swelled by foreign jihadist fighters from around the world.

Godane’s agenda was much more ambitious and dangerous than Robow’s. He had taken over from Robow as al-Shabaab’s ‘Amir’ in 2009 at the age of just thirty-one, and had since pushed him and the old guard to the margins of the debate on the movement’s future. Godane had also fought the jihad in Afghanistan, but the conclusions he had drawn from his experiences there were quite different to Robow’s. Godane publicly pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden when he became Amir, an act that propelled al-Shabaab to the top of the list of proscribed terrorist organizations in half a
dozen countries. He became a natural magnet for Islamists from around the world who regarded Somalia as the newest and most promising battlefront in the global war against the infidel. In February 2012 bin Laden’s successor, the Egyptian surgeon-theologian Ayman al-Zawahiri, announced that al-Shabaab and al-Qaida had formally merged. Did Godane dream, as bin Laden once dreamed, of overthrowing the West through war and terrorism and establishing a new international caliphate? It was the question that kept the chiefs of Western intelligence organizations awake at night.

The version of Sharia that Godane advocated for Somalia was far more severe than Robow’s. His ideology was based on a foreign import – Wahhabist Salafism – and, unlike his rival, he appeared to have no respect at all for Somalia’s gentler Sufi traditions. For example, although Robow disapproved of the Sufi custom of ancestor worship, he stopped far short of ordering the destruction of shrines. The disagreements between Godane and Robow over such matters were no secret, but were played out in public via Mogadishu’s many radio stations. Indeed, the narrative of dissent within al-Shabaab formed an almost constant backdrop to the national news. And although some of this was undoubtedly TFG propaganda, it was clear from Robow’s occasional interviews and from intelligence leaks that a great deal of it was not.

The key to the difference between the pair was their clan heritage and where they were from. Robow, who was born in Berdaale in the south-central province of Bay, belonged to the Leysan sub-clan of the Rahanweyn, the clan group dominant in the south of Somalia that had long been subjugated by the ‘nobler’ clans of the north, and which formed the backbone of al-Shabaab’s rank and file. Godane, by contrast, belonged to the Isaaq clan and
was born in Hargeisa in Somaliland, hundreds of miles from al-Shabaab’s heartlands. There were some who argued that Godane had no choice but to rely on foreign jihadist fighters. Unlike Robow, he was unable to count on the loyalty of any local clan for support. The flipside of this apparent disadvantage was that he also owed no obligation towards the clans of the south. Being an outsider allowed him to pursue any agenda he pleased, and the cruellest of policies, unconstrained by local sensitivities.

No one knew how many foreign fighters Godane really commanded. In early 2012, estimates ranged between 200 and 2,000. The majority were said to come from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and the Muslim Swahili coast, although they came from further afield too. Many had simply travelled on from Iraq or Afghanistan, experienced fighters who had made a career out of international jihadism: Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Middle East Arabs. It was sometimes possible to identify the old hands from the methods they used. Al-Shabaab’s snipers, for instance, had been taught to shoot from far back in a building through a tunnel of ‘murder holes’ dug through a series of walls: a technique much used by the Taliban in Helmand during the urban platoon house sieges of 2006–7. The best al-Shabaab marksman was said to be a Chechen, a veteran of the Iraq war, who had shot so many people with his trademark Dragunov rifle that the medics at the AMISOM field hospital had learned to recognize his handiwork.

And then there were the diaspora volunteers, young Somalis who held Western passports: American, Canadian, British, Scandinavian. This category of foreign fighter worried the security services in those countries most of all – especially, in an Olympics-hosting year, Britain’s. A report published by London’s Royal United Services Institute in 2012 put the number of foreign fighters
in Somalia at just two hundred, but estimated that as many as fifty of these were UK citizens, and spoke of the difficulty of preventing a ‘lone wolf’ attack in Britain by one of them.
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Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, had already warned in a speech in 2010 that it was ‘only a matter of time before we see terrorism on our streets inspired by those who are today fighting alongside al-Shabaab’.
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Sure enough, a month before the Games in July 2012, a 24-year-old London Somali was arrested after he was spotted on CCTV crossing east London’s new Olympic Park five times, in specific breach of an earlier Home Office control order. Identified by police as ‘CF’, the man was already suspected of having fought for al-Shabaab, of trying to recruit other Britons to the cause, and of attempting to travel to Afghanistan for terrorist training. A Home Office lawyer warned that CF wanted to ‘re-engage in terrorism-related activities, either in the UK or Somalia’ and is ‘determined to continue to adhere to his Islamist extremist agenda’.
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On 8 June 2011, Western security services received a fillip when Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, al-Qaida’s leader in East Africa, was unexpectedly killed in Mogadishu. A suspect in the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed more than two hundred people, the Comoros-born Fazul had been bin Laden’s
amin sirr
or ‘confidential secretary’ for over a decade, with an FBI bounty on his head of $5m. He had been one of the al-Qaida leader’s closest confidants – so close, indeed, that he managed bin Laden’s wives’ travel arrangements, and even used to shave his boss’s head.
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The Bancroft Hotel was still abuzz with what had happened. Fazul and an accomplice had been driving towards the al-Shabaab-held suburb of Dayniile late one night when they apparently took a wrong turning, and ran into a twenty-strong TFG checkpoint.
Fazul tried to brazen it out with the sentries on duty by pretending that he and the driver were elders. One soldier, Abdi Hassan, ordered Fazul to show himself by turning on the car’s interior light, which he did, although only for a second. But this was long enough for Abdi, already suspicious, to spot that they were armed. He was fully alert, he helpfully explained to reporters later, because his unit always chewed qat when they were on duty at night.
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Fazul’s driver’s last act was to pull a pistol which, fortunately for Abdi, jammed. Both militants died instantly in a hail of return fire. A dusty black Toyota was later put on display for photographers, who counted more than a dozen bullet holes in its windscreen. Among the contents of the car were medicines, three mobile phones, three Kalashnikovs, a South African passport, $40,000 in cash, paperwork, and a laptop. The soldiers immediately took the cash and distributed it amongst themselves, but everything else was recovered by the security services. The laptop turned out to contain much valuable information on, for instance, al-Qaida funding networks. There was also a list of potential terrorist targets which included the Ritz Hotel in London and even the British prime minister’s
alma mater
, Eton College.